Venez m'aider - a layman's view

The title in French means 'come help me'. This is the phrase from where the verbal code for distress "Mayday" is coined. I feel the hapless workers in Bangladesh are giving us the same signal.

It is estimated that the country currently has 2.5 crore unemployed people with 1.5 crore of them educated. They need work to maintain their family and find a place in the society. But what about the majority of others who are already employed from non-skilled to high-skilled jobs?

Let's start from the grass-root. People working in construction firms, hotels, brick-fields, shops and bazars, as day-laborers. They are unskilled, uneducated people, and to keep their families afloat, they work from dawn to dusk to try to earn their bread. They most often just subsist, dragging their lives through malnutrition, weakness, sickness and rapid deterioration of health conditions. They are human beings taking part in an almost impossible fight every morning. They don't have much to dream about; in fact, they don't dream at all. They are just trying to 'continue' their existence, and that urge is also due  to man's primal instinct for survival.

Poets write poems on them, reporters often quiz them to cover their allotted pages, and some human rights organizations issue statements trying to attract our attention to the distressed condition of these people around us. We sympathize with them, and then go by our own ways.

The state is involved in another farce at this level, with these poor souls and the likes. Often these people are sent abroad to work, and most often, their conditions over there are beyond description. Take, for example, the case of Saudi Arabia. Bangladeshis in millions work there and the flow has never stopped completely. Recently, the Saudi government has initiated another step to recruit more workers of different skills for them.

Is there a statistics to show their standing in this foreign land? Have there been investigations and reports as to how these people are being treated there? And what about various allegations that had sprung up from time to time? Have they been verified?

If an account is started as to how they lead their lives in the face of adversity and suppression, then it would surely be a horrid one. But we are sending these helpless people there, and to some other parts of the world - and they are oppressed, inhumanely treated, overworked, underpaid, harassed in different forms and then kicked back home without any benefits.

Semi-skilled workers have a mentionable salary, but they still have their own, unique problems. They cannot decrease their living standards to go with the scanty salary they receive, neither can they live up to the standard that their job designation requires. Most often, either these people become corrupt or they lead a life full of grief and dissatisfaction.

But what about the educated, skilled and employed ones? Those who are in the public sector are well protected, even when they are not corrupt. But the situations in the private sector are the same story. Overwork, underpay, oppression, harassment, insecurity and very long work-hours. It is slavery in a different garment.

In total, the conditions of workforce of our country are very bad and further deteriorating every day. It will be interesting to monitor how much research in the social studies department is done regarding the issues and the scenario discussed here.

But that much can be safely said, that Labor day is much more than ensuring a holiday for those unfortunate laborers in different positions. It is also not about seminars and political talks and promises. It would best be observed if proper situation is realized and appropriate plan is chalked out to improve the conditions of workers and employees.

Otherwise, labors of Bangladesh will unite one day, and that brute, unpolished force may very well bring about another Bangladesh chapter of French revolution. 

Fukushima: What message it 'emanates' for us.

Today, more and more people want to live in cities. They don't want the dull, languid, laid-back life in the rural areas. Instead, they want more charm and excitement of the city life where you have a well-lighted town with people driving their fashionable cars and fast-food shops spilling out with customers. You have discos, bars, theaters, concerts and shopping malls on busy roads. People dressed well and wearing a variety of perfumes all go about, meet and look at each other, and feel the warmth of hearts. Who would want to take dinner after sunset and go to bed nowadays? After all, who don't want fun and excitement in life?

That's where the problem starts. Our life is pitched up against the life of the planet we live in. To be more clear, just as we have our biological clock in-built in our body that tells us when to take food or go to sleep, so have we a particular schedule for our planet earth. If we observe, we see the sun rising early at around 6 and setting after 12 hours at around 6 in the afternoon. But we get up a couple of hours late and keep awake up to 1 or 2 in the morning, burning our midnight oil and all the other resources that we need in order to keep us going, like electricity, gas etc.

We need to do more in today's world. We need to write, publish and read more, we need to use our laptop more and more, we need our food to be delicious even more. We are researching into new fields of knowledge and studies every day. People are getting more and more knowledgeable every day now, with the contribution of tools like the internet and tv. We have professors lecturing on different topics of interest at the universities and researchers carrying out new and exciting projects in the labs.

We do these all to BETTER our lives. It's true today than ever before, that we need more electricity now, to do MORE in order to produce MORE, to consume MORE. We are not morons but are trapped in this cycle of 'doing more'. And in order to 'do' more, we are taxing our world resources.

We have set up atomic power plants, and look what is happening in Fukushima. The situation is completely out of our control.

If we chart down the pattern of natural disasters, we see there has never been a very quiet phase. We need to admit that this planet of ours has its own way of going about. There will always be some natural disasters in some expected or unexpected forms, in one particular area or in another. We don't need to create problems for ourselves, the planet that we inhabit will take care of it periodically for us. What we ought to do, in order to ensure mutual coexistence, is a synchronized way of living, a kind of livelihood that draws on the facilities of the planet, and at the same time, helps to replenish the sources and strengths of nature in order to restore it to its full strength.

Building nuclear reactors are atomic power stations are not the right way to bring our society forward for any conceivably good reason. These establishments are blithe spots on the body of our planet earth and our planet therefore has every right to retaliate back in response to such heinous acts. Fukushima today sends us this exact message.  Anything can go terribly wrong anytime.

So we should be unitedly concerned in living harmoniously with nature. We should use the daily routine of the planet to our advantage and start and finish our day according to the rising and setting of the lamp of the planet, e.g. the sun. We should limit our wanton and excess desires of trying to live a very exciting life, simply because it exhausts more resources and we  personally can't account for such uses of the same.

We can't just destroy our planet, we don't have the right to do so. We must find ways to have an eco-friendly life steeped in high values and restraints. We can't just be 'fun-loving' vultures, feeding on the corpses of our desires.